Astronomers have observed the calamitous result of a star that picked the wrong dance partner. They have documented what appears to be a new type of supernova, as stellar explosions are known, that occurred when a massive star tried to swallow a black hole with which it had engaged in a lengthy pas de deux.<\/p>\n
The star, which was at least 10 times as massive as our sun, and the black hole, which had a similar mass, were gravitationally bound to one another in what is called a binary system.<\/p>\n
But as the distance separating them gradually narrowed, the black hole\u2019s immense gravitational pull appears to have distorted the star \u2013 stretching it out from its spherical shape \u2013 and siphoned off material before causing it to explode.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe caught a massive star locked in a fatal tango with a black hole,\u201d said astrophysicist Alexander Gagliano of the US National Science Foundation\u2019s Institute for AI and Fundamental Interactions located at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, lead author of the study published this week in the Astrophysical Journal.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfter shedding mass for years in a death spiral with the black hole, the massive star met its finale by exploding. It released more energy in a second than the sun has across its entire lifetime,\u201d Gagliano added.<\/p>\n
The explosion occurred about 700 million light-years from Earth. A light-year is the distance light travels in a year, 9.5 trillion km (5.9 trillion miles).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers have observed the calamitous result of a star that picked the wrong dance partner. They have documented…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70012,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[1724,64,63,99,512,164,10340,1625,44,1721,128,28765,285,588,105,2489,1720],"class_list":["post-70011","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-asia","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-business","tag-china","tag-economy","tag-hong-kong","tag-lifestyle","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-science","tag-south-china-morning-post","tag-space","tag-sport","tag-technology","tag-us","tag-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70011","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70011"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70011\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70012"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70011"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70011"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70011"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}